Intel

Intel (INTC) has been on the move this week.  It crossed the all important $25 a share level and held above it all week. I take this as a great technical short time sign. You can make money in this one short or long term.  Buy here and collect the 3.6% dividend while you wait.  Good luck investing.  Tony

Intel

Intel has finally broken through the $25 a share level.  I see it testing the $28 level this year.  Don't miss this great opportunity to buy a super blue chip paying almost a 4% dividend!  Buy and hold forever. It works for Warren Buffet!  Good luck investing.  Tony

Intel

Does AMD Stand a Chance Against Intel's Cherry Trail?

By Ashraf Eassa | More Articles
March 13, 2014 | Comments (1)

At Intel's (NASDAQ: INTC  ) investor meeting, CFO Stacy Smith was keen to highlight the cost savings in the low-end PC space in moving from its Bay Trail-M/D products to the Celeron version of its Broxton system-on-chip, which was designed primarily for smartphones and tablets. Indeed, according to the following graphic, the cost reduction from the current-generation Bay Trail-M/D to Broxton, a 2015 product, is on the order of 37%.

(Source: Intel)

What about Cherry Trail?
The above chart has Intel moving from the 22-nanometer Bay Trail to the 14-nanometer Broxton, completely skipping over Cherry Trail, the successor to Bay Trail in tablets, shown in Intel's most recent mobile roadmap.

(Source: Intel)

It's understandable that Intel would skip doing a Cherry Trail-based smartphone chip as the company attempts to accelerate to leadership with Broxton. But it has always been odd that Intel had implied that it would be skipping over Cherry Trail for low-end notebook and desktop PCs. After all, Cherry Trail – from some of the leaked specifications thus far – seems like it would be a more-than-potent successor to Intel's current Bay Trail-M/D lines for low-end notebooks and desktops, respectively. It turns out that the company is indeed bringing out Cherry Trail-M/D.
The evidence is crystal clear
A website known as Zauba allows users to track products that are imported into and exported out of India. In doing a search for anything related to a potential Cherry Trail-M/D part, the following came up:

(Source: Zauba)

It looks as though Intel has every intention of bringing to market a 14-nanometer, Cherry Trail-based line of low-end PC processors. This is great news for Intel and its PC margins, as these chips should be extremely small and cheap to make. Unfortunately, it's not so fantastic news for Intel's weaker rival, Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD  ) , particularly as Cherry Trail will not just be cheap to make, but will be extremely low-power and feature a significantly overhauled graphics engine.
AMD is stuck
Today, AMD competes at the low end against Intel's Bay Trail-M/D with a part known as Kabini. This is a 28-nanometer SoC based on the Jaguar CPU core and AMD's in-house Radeon graphics IP. While it offers higher graphics performance than Intel's part -- and roughly equivalent CPU performance -- it consumes a lot more power. In addition, Intel is building these chips on 22-nanometer manufacturing plants that have been paid for by the company's Ivy Bridge and Haswell generation of PC processors. AMD, on the other hand, needs to hand the foundry margin over to Taiwan Semiconductor (NYSE: TSM  ) , which impacts its ability to engage in a price war profitably with Intel.
When Intel moves to 14-nanometer, the chipmaker will have roughly a two-generation manufacturing lead. That means Intel will be able to pack far more features into far less of a die area than AMD can at 28nm. Further, Intel's Cherry Trail is likely to neutralize or perhaps even reverse the graphics advantage that AMD currently enjoys, but it will be able to do so in a much tighter power envelope. It's just not a pretty situation for AMD, which makes it difficult to believe in an AMD share-maintenance story, let alone a share-growth story in PCs.
Foolish bottom line
AMD is doing the best it can, but the deck really is stacked against the company. With Intel aggressively fighting with Bay Trail-M/D today and with plans to transition to Cherry Trail-M/D presumably by the holiday season, can AMD's much-hyped Beema/Mullins really stand a chance?

Yet Another Intel Article

Ashraf Eassa

Long/short equity, contrarian, independent research, tech

Profile| Send Message| Follow (7,849)  

Intel An Embarrassment? No.

Mar. 7, 2014 9:10 AM ET  |  58 comments |  About: INTC, Includes: QCOM

Disclosure: I am long INTC. (More...)

Summary

• Intel has been accused of being an embarrassment by noted columnist, Rocco Pendola.
• While mobile execution not great, the article claims Intel's brand is worthless.
• This assertion is flat-out wrong.

When I checked the Intel (INTC) headlines on Yahoo! Finance, I saw a piece titled, "Intel Has Become An Embarrassment" on The Street. I was actually stricken by just how the piece actually failed to substantiate its key bearish arguments against Intel. In particular, I take issue with the following remarks:

If anybody wins at wearables it's not going to be Intel, a company with zero brand cachet with consumers and a legacy that will completely expire if Apple ever takes over the chip slot on its Macbooks.

And, of course,

The more Intel loses, the less it can afford to lose.

Now, let me be perfectly upfront and say that I actually agree with the author that "wearables" will mostly turn out to be a fad, and I further agree that Intel has no business actually selling end-devices to users (since, after all, Intel is a chip company), but the other claims... Well, I humbly offer my rebuttal.

No Brand Cachet?

According to the author, Intel has zero brand cachet with consumers. I mean, after all, Intel only has that cutesy "Intel Inside" logo plastered onto about 80% (and growing) of the Windows PCs on the planet. (Ironically enough, the MacBook/iMac line don't have this branding, so Apple's piddly 16 million computers sold per year wouldn't mean much to Intel should Apple try to have a go at it with its own chips). Oh, and the PC market is only a 300-million unit market today.
Sure, you can argue that the PC market is in perpetual decline (I think the traditional PC market is on the decline, but the rise of convertibles and Intel's foray into tablets will, in time, more than offset this), but what you can't argue with is that according to Interbrand (you know, just one of the world's largest brand consultancies), Intel is the 9th most valuable brand in the world.
Yes, folks. Even though Intel blew it and is no longer the world's largest semiconductor company by market capitalization (that'd be Qualcomm (QCOM)), it still has by far the most powerful brand of any semiconductor company and, as far as technology goes, is only slightly behind Samsung.

Intel Can Afford To Lose On These Hobbies

It's obvious that Intel's executive team collectively blew it when it came to pursuing the mobile market - they underestimated the market and, more importantly, the competition, so I completely agree that the clock is ticking on its mobile strategy. This is doubly true as Intel is not only not seeing a return on its massive ~$4b/year investment in mobile (this is Qualcomm-level, without the Qualcomm revenues), but the PC market (Intel's core business) is in secular decline as far as anybody can tell, so success here is imperative.
I also agree that Intel shouldn't be wasting money on acquisitions of third-rate "wearables" makers like Basis (seriously, go read the Amazon reviews of their products sometime - utterly junk), but $100 million here or there for a company that generates ~$11 billion/year in free cash flow just isn't going to break the bank. If Intel wants to make these acquisitions and potentially learn something about the industries it may want to supply chips into, then why not? All of Intel's failed mobile chips thus far have cost >$100 million each to develop, but the company presumably learned something from those failures.

Conclusion

Does Intel need to pull it together in mobile and start developing leadership products? Of course.
Is the PC market in deep trouble? Depends on your definition of "PC".
Does Intel need to get a pretty significant chunk of the mobile pie in order to offset PC declines? Of course.
But is Intel's brand worthless? Will spending a couple-hundred million to learn about wearables really break the bank? Nope.
Is Intel an embarrassment? Well, do any other chip design houses own their own fabs, generate $50 billion in semiconductor revenue, and have a more valuable brand than Intel?
No.

Intc Positive Post

I just read another positive post over at Seeking Alpha about Intel's Tablet plans.  A year from now when they will have sold over 40 million Tablet chips will will look at this time as the Stock's "Tipping Point".  This will have been a great time to but and hold INTC for the long haul.  In March of 2015 I will be posing about what a great year it was to be holding Intel's stock.  After cashing my 4% dividend payments and seeing a 50% price rise in the stock.  Good luck investing.  Tony